Hey let's start talking about the Postman reading! What were your thoughts and first impressions? What did you learn? How do you find this useful? (Also answer or address anything you wish concerning your thoughts on the reading).
As soon as I started to read this article, I was intrigued by the whole "crap detection" and change topics of conversation. The article brings up some good points, but also brings my greatest fears to surface: how will we engage the majority of our students throughout every lesson? With technology and interests growing and changing at an irreversible, rapid rate, we will need to update our teaching methods as well. Think about it: over the past 50 years, so much has changed in terms of resources and ideas, but what we teach and how we teach has, in many ways, stayed the same. If we can't keep up with the times, how can we expect to keep students engaged?
I guess it brings me back to my experience with the mini lesson presentations in the freshman comp classes. I'm not sure how many have you heard, but mine went terribly. No one participated, and I didn't come prepared with backup plans, so my entire lesson blew up in my face. Lesson learned, but how do we deal if none of our plans work, or if what seems interesting and engaging to us is boring and lame to our students? I love the one quote in the text that goes, "a classroom is an environment and the way it is organized carries the burden of what people will learn from it" (18). So, that being said, it is up to US to create the classroom and activities to make sure the students stay interested enough to take the lessons for what they are.
But, this just brings me with even more questions: what is that ideal environment? Is there a universal technique, or do we have to make sure to keep up with current trends and interests? (this goes back along with the entire idea of change that the reading talked about) How do we deal with resistant students? Maybe I just worry too much, but this article really makes me anxious about teaching next year.
Sam, I think it's awesome that you had that experience with your mini lesson!! It may have seemed disastrous at the time, but I believe your experience may have been more useful this way than if it had gone well! You now have that experience and have learned from it, which will greatly benefit yourself and your future students!! I know what you mean about being anxious for this year, but I also believe that through sticking it out and dealing with circumstances as they arise, we will become much better prepared and experienced teachers, something that will conitinue to only improve with time :)
Even though this article was written in the late 1960s, I found so much in it that is relevant today. Two points that particularly stuck out to me were the ideas that students need to be able to detect what information is vital for them to retain and really "know" as opposed to what may need to be filtered and that we are in an era that could primarily be described as episodic rather than linear or sequential.
The first point focuses on students and the qualities of a "good learner." Postman points out that in the current school system of his day, students were expected to passively absorb information, learn the "right" or "agreed upon" answers to pass some tests, and then forget everything they had learned. Afterall, once you've "had" it, you are immune and don't need to take a course in that subject again. Honestly, that is a horrifying way to approach education because it goes against everything that humans do, which is to progress and improve their situation through invention and intellect. What concerns me most as I enter into a year of student teaching is whether or not I am capable of showing students that real learning is about discovering our world and what it means to be human, rather than getting good grades that teachers decide on.
The second point concerning our episodic society was not a new concept for me, but I did have a mini-revelation in regards to its connection with HOW students learn. It's true that most courses are laid out in a sequential pattern, because it makes sense that we build upon concepts as the year progresses. However, it was an important reminder to me that learners are picking up numerous concepts simultaneously in all of their courses and that there may be some areas in which they excel rapidly while other aspects need some time to catch up. I want to keep this in mind during my student teaching because even though it may look like a student completely missed a concept and won't be able to understand material later down the road, it's just as possible that their "aha" moment is yet to come, because further foundational work needs to happen for them before they can grasp a concept.
A last quote that I would like to point out is this: "As the number of messages increases, the amount of information carried decreases. We have more media to communicate fewer significant ideas" (8). Keep in mind that this was written in 1968, before the Internet was even around. This is an interesting statement that almost seems contradictory to the basis of the article when translated to today's world. Postman is asking teachers to "pursue relevance" yet be wary of using a medium that may be severely lacking in terms of content albeit trendy and popular. I take this as a challenge to incorporate technology and media into my classroom while digging deep into ideas and issues instead of giving attention to a fancy layout, catchy blog posts, or hip sensationalism.
I thought Postman's arguments about the influences of mass media on society and education were fascinating. His main point, mass media outlets like television and radio offer simplified versions of history and can be manipulated easily to create propaganda, seems as relevant today as when he wrote it nearly fifty years ago. I wonder how Postman would view newer forms of communication, mainly the internet. Because newspapers, television and radio are passive forms of communication, viewers or readers absorb whatever tidbits of information given to them. Postman did not like the fact that these forms of communication offered no room for thoughtful discourse and could not effectively relate the entirety of the information. I wonder how Postman would view the internet, which has given citizens an open public forum to discuss the information that used to be simply given to them as pure facts.
Postman's views on technology do not directly relate to the classroom, but I think they relate to an effective classroom. Like Postman, I believe that education becomes mindless propaganda if the teacher leaves no room for thoughtful discourse of the information. As teachers, we must instill a sense of thoughtfulness in students so that they can prevent what Postman described as, entropy in our society. I think that is the role of our education system, and our primary duty as teachers.
Mark, I absolutely love love love what you brought to this discussion. I agree with majority of what Postman brings to light when he begins talking about what you say is “mindless propaganda” in education. As you believe we need to “instill a sense of thoughtfulness in students” so that they can see the world for what it is, Postman believes the same but explains it under his “crap detecting” allusion to Hemingway. This allusion goes straight into his desire for students to gain the “anthropological perspective…that allows one to be part of his own culture and, at the same time, be out of it.” Which is beautiful, which is exhilarating, which is being an active participant and life long learner when you live in a constant state of inquiry of your world! This is what we as teachers want for our students. I’d love to hand out “crap-detector badges” to the ones who grow to become this in my classroom.
The Postman reading succeeded in reminding me once again how complex teaching can be.
"Once you have learned how to ask questions-- relevant and appropriate and substantial questions- you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know."
Out of the entire Postman reading, I believe this single sentence is the most important. In traditional schools students are given information from either a textbook or a teacher, they are told to memorize that information and then forced to regurgitate it in a paper or on a test, and that is considered learning. Everyone knows what it's like to cram last minute for a test, vomit up the answers, and then never think about that information ever again. That is not learning and it should not be considered education.
Every teacher's goal is to create life long learners, and the only way that will happen is if we take Postman's advice and cultivate students who feel safe enough to be proactive, interrogative, and creative in and out of the classroom.
Ashley, I highlighted this quote as well!! Questions certainly are the key to learning because it implies engaged students and people that yearn to know more. What more could teachers want?? I know when I was in high school I was known as the girl who asked questions, and this embarrassed me for a bit until I realized I didn't care what other people thought. It is up to us, as teachers, to create a classroom environment
I really enjoyed reading this article. I view teaching as a job that revolves around challenging yourself, and your students, so I immediately agreed with many things that this article was saying. I loved the quote by Alfred North White which pointed out that while generations are taught values and ideas by their forefathers that will have an effect on the way that they live; this generation cannot rely on these old values and ideas because of the rate at which things are changing. I think that this should be in the back of every teachers mind because as a teacher it’s important to realize that what you are teaching may or may not be relevant to their actual lives, so instead, teachers must focus on encouraging students to think for themselves. The only way to truly prepare students for the future is to do this, especially because we probably won’t be able to even imagine what the future holds for many of our students, whether it be new technology, medicine, science, or social views. This seems so simple now that we are young and living with this changing world almost alongside our students, but as we age and continue to get new students around the same ages, they will be facing an entirely different world from the one that we grew up with and learned to live in.
I think that working with the inquiry method of teaching will be a new challenge every day, which is how teaching (and learning) should be. Asking questions is so important to everyday life, and true learning. Children begin their learning by asking questions like, “what is that?” or “why?” so the idea of asking questions to learn should come naturally to many students once they are comfortable in their learning environment.
I really liked Mark’s input on how Postman would view the internet as a way of communication as well as mass media. I think that he would be somewhat torn on his views. For one thing, it’s just another way for students to have to be “crap detectors.” What is true and relevant are sometimes harder to judge while reading something online. On the other hand, Postman was concerned about mass media being a one-way communication, which isn’t necessarily true on the internet. After many articles online there is a comment section, so there is a kind of way to reflect and ask questions, but this can also turn into pointless arguments, with no real lead to finding actual information or knowledge. The good thing about this, for us, is that our students will probably have looked at articles online, maybe even replied to them, and have read replies from others, so they may have an easier time at seeing media as something to be questioned, and therefore information in general as something to be questioned. I hope that once students are comfortable and realize that questions are encouraged and, in fact, required to learn that they will naturally flow into this kind of learning.
My main question after reading this article is how can we implement this during co-teaching? We will all obviously have some lessons that we must stick to in order to fulfill our requirements in student teaching as well as meet the requirements of our curriculum, but I think that we can do this on a smaller scale where we encourage students to ask questions inside our lesson plans that are relevant to the curriculum as well as their lives. This will hopefully give students more ownership over what they are learning in school, as well as still make the school board happy because we have “covered” their required material.
Kelsey, your comments got me thinking and revisiting some ideas that have cropped up during the past two years at Millersville. I have some thoughts in response:
It is seductive to think that we live in a new world. One has only to look around to notice that it seems that we know so much more than we ever did and that we are applying our knowledge in so many new and unprecedented ways. Information (and disinformation, and misinformation) is more easily discovered and distributed than ever before. Technology continues to develop at an exponential pace, and this appears to be driving social change on a massive scale. As a result, it seems logical to say "this generation cannot rely on these old values and ideas because of the rate at which things are changing." While I understand the impulse, I disagree with the statement.
The Postman text was published in 1968, a time of great social change in the US and elsewhere. On the surface, a lot of the content is a product of the times: references to Vietnam and Black Power, a male-centric perspective. But the underlying theme of taking a 'subversive' approach to learning is, in my opinion, a bit of a historical constant. Rejecting established norms and concepts was as fashionable among young, idealistic people then as it is now, and as much as it has always been (my parents did this to a certain degree in '68; I did it to a degree in '88; Millersville students are encouraged to do it in '13 [and doesn't it strike your inner rebel as suspicious that an established Institution is encouraging us to be subversive?! There's a topic for a bull session!]). The idea that the world is changing too rapidly for the past to have much relevance was not a new concept, even in 1968 (Age of Enlightenment, anyone?).
So, if the impulse to reject the past is nothing new, and uncertainty about the form of the future is nothing new, perhaps it is short-sighted to reject out of hand the values and ideas of the past. I submit that the values and ideas of the past are all we have to work with, and I will argue until closing time for the content teachers are required to 'cover' (if we have no idea what kind of future our students are facing, how can we (or they) decide what is or is not relevant?). Much of what gives us the impression of living in a new world is cosmetic. The differences are mostly surface-level; 'New and Improved' rarely is. The underlying truths -- people need to be able to communicate, to parse out possible truth from apparent fiction, to have an agile mind in order to adapt to changing circumstances -- have not changed, ever. What the authors are rejecting is not the ideas, values, or content, but the complacent approach educators and students take to learning. The inquiry method of learning (notice I didn't say teaching) has always existed; it seems like a natural instinct and I think we may be surprised at how easily we incorporate it into our classrooms.
HOLY HARRY POTTER. While reading Harry Potter, you see crap detecting at its finest. You are banded together with Harry to discover that you must constantly question what’s being told in the media. In the Order of the Phoenix Cornelius Fudge and the Ministry of Magic put all their energy in lying to the public that Voldemort—the biggest threat to the community’s lives—is back at large. They love being safe and pretending the world is not changing; as Postman would say, they are “The repositories of conventional assumptions and standard practices—two of the greatest accelerators of entropy.” Dolores Umbridge is our present day representation of education. If that doesn’t make you want to punch something or realize how important it is that we educate for inquiry-driven students and not complacent repositories of facts that go in one ear and out the other than I hope you meet a Blast-Ended Skrewt (too far? Nah haha).
Harry Potter proves that a “subversive” education is possible! Albeit challenging and NOT incredibly new of an idea (as we all have somewhat admitted to in our responses that an inquiry based education is not all that new a view), but the problem is “to get a hearing for them [the idea].” Harry, Dumbledore, and the entire Order serves as the “Anti-bureaucracy Bureaucracy” that has a perspective on its own society—a “What is it Good for?” attitude. They crap-detected the crap out of the Ministry from the very beginning! But it was getting heard that was the most challenging, but also the most rewarding once it happened. Let’s put this in our classrooms, guys.
Let’s get our students to see the beauty of questioning their worlds, because it’s possible. Let’s build our own Dumbledore Armies with subversive education, because it what education needs to revitalize society away from the mindlessness.
Woohoo! This is wonderful! I like your point that subversive education is challenging, yet possible. It is essential to have students question the world they live in. It's as simple as switching the question from "Who discovered how to apparate?" to "How do you discover who discovered how to apparate?" (from Postman reading, with a little revision). Wait! You mean the teacher isn't just telling us anymore? We have to figure it out for ourselves?
I am reminded of Dumbledore's brilliance in allowing Harry to come to many of his conclusions on his own. He pointed him in the right direction, but just gave Harry enough information to cause him to find out on his own because he understood that "learning is a happening in itself" (Postman).
And I'm right there with you Becca, let's teach our kids to crap detect the crap out of crap!
I love what everybody has talked about so far with the Postman reading, and I will respectfully try not to repeat subjects because that would be just plain redundant and boring; a waste of time.
Something I found noteworthy and important is the discussion on naming. I have a negative view towards labels because of our habit of overusing them to the point that they become trite. We like to think that if we find the right label for some process or idea, we must then know all about that thing. This is completely ridiculous, and highlights a tendency to confuse knowledge with definition and memorization. I like how Postman cautioned against thinking this way. Names are a way of categorizing things to give us the ability to refer to ideas without describing it every time. But soon the name becomes the idea, replacing the actual practice and process of the idea. “While giving names to things, obviously, is an indispensible human activity, it can be a dangerous one, especially when you are trying to understand a complex and delicate process” (p.26). Now that is something we would do well to remember.
We are about to embark upon a great journey. We will be learning all sorts of teaching styles and terminology to aid us as future teachers. This information will be invaluable to us as long as we remember that we need to focus more on understanding the concepts and how to work with them than on memorizing their names and thinking we understand the theories. “The medium is a process, not a thing.” That means we must work to understand the concepts and workings of the process. I have a very hard time remembering the certain names for introducing an idea to students at the beginning of a lesson or class period, but that does not stop me from knowing the importance of said activities, and I may even utilize them “unknowingly” despite my inability to remember the official title.
My point is, the name is just a way to categorize our ideas. If I think I understand something completely based on the title given to the method, I will most likely not really understand everything about the actual process. It may make me look good at parties, as people will note the ease with which I bandy about different terms of highly regarded teaching methods in such a sangfroid manner, but that will ultimately gain me very little in the end. I would rather struggle to remember the “correct” term than not understand or be unable to utilize in the field the right process for teaching and instruction. I want to help feed inquisitive minds and spark curiosity in minds less inclined to question. I think that is called teaching.
I'm with Jesse in valuing the understanding and application of a process or an approach over memorizing the label for the process/approach.
Sure, it's easier for me to communicate what I'm doing if I can put a recognizable label on it ("I'm using this device to generate microwave energy to excite the water molecules in the food I've placed inside." or "I'm nuking a brownie."), but it is much more important to understand why I'm doing something and how to do it than to give it a name. I toenail wood on a regular basis, and I understand that driving nails at an angle to join two boards builds a much stronger joint than other options. More importantly, I know that I can use this method to move stubborn boards into their proper position and I can make adjustments to a joint using the same approach, even after the joint has been established improperly. If I never knew this was called 'toenailing', I would be no less effective a carpenter. If all I knew was that driving nails in at an angle was called 'toenailing', I would not be as effective a carpenter.
(What's he mumbling about? http://www.wikihow.com/Toenail-Wood)
Awkward examples aside, I think this is an important point to remember when designing lessons (and assessments!!). Students need to understand how and why much more than they need to remember when and who.
Jesse, I found your comments on the nature of names intriguing and an important concept to consider. Names, and more importantly labels can easily become meaningless when the idea behind them is lost or misinterpreted. While reading your comment, I thought of the numerous buzzwords that are flashed before our eyes in our consumer society. That appear everywhere from billboards to the front page headlines. Complete divorced from meaning, a word, or a name can become a tool for misinformation. Words and names losing and gaining new meanings is not a good or a bad thing, but like Jesse said, everyone must understand the underlying ideas behind them.
Wes, I like your analogy of the dovetail. It demonstrates to me that you understand the concept I was teaching, and proves that you can do more than just recite facts. You receive an A for your reply. Keep up the good work! ;)
Mark, isn't it interesting how quickly words or ideas can lose their meaning or have it change completely? It's the natural process of a living language, but it takes a lot of work to keep up with sometimes, and I often find myself feeling disgruntled that words are used differently (or as I see it, misused) and I want to revert to the old, better way. Well here's a little tidbit that may be helpful for us English types to remember. If we get too worked up with trying to halt the progress of language change (which we cannot, no matter how hard we try) we are only working against the natural progression of language. There is no "perfect" way to speak English. Chaucer liked double and triple (and sometimes more) negatives, and people of his time liked aks instead of ask, and brid instead of bird. If we think that trying to maintain a grip on proper English is important, we should probably at least adhere to the oldest form of English, which is somewhat ridiculous to modern speakers. So there you have it, don't prescribe, describe. Teach students how to write according to the "proper standards" of the day, but let's not get too crazy with making sure they "write correctly," because, as it turns out, the correct way may soon be out of style.
Whoops, I tend to get carried away when talking about words and language.
"...that we need to focus more on understanding the concepts and how to work with them than on memorizing their names and thinking we understand the theories."
THIS QUOTE. After slowly reading through Postman (I've been reading bits and pieces of both readings over this incredibly busy summer) and all of these responses to the reading I think this is seriously one of the most important concepts we could take away from this discussion.
Simply put, I believe this completely wraps up all of my fears about entering a classroom. We're all college students here so we completely understand the difference between learning something's name and actually understanding it at a deep enough level to go out and perform it. I can't even begin to count the amount of tests I've taken in which I've been able to spout off terms and describe them to you but would completely fail if the test was one that judged my skill level while performing that term.
I think back to Ed Psych. All of the vast amount of information regarding student's differing levels of psychological ability and the stages of development, would I truly be able to recognize these withing my real-live students, not just textbook examples? I can tell you the names and labels of just about anything I learned in that class, but what does that really help me with in the classroom unless I understand the concepts behind them?
I also go back to Bloom's Taxonomy. It's a higher level of thinking that is required of us. Instead of simple knowledge we need to be able to comprehend and apply this knowledge. We also need to be aware of how we as teachers instruct our future students, and make sure we keep them out of the educational pitfall of knowledge without action.
I think you completely touched on what I am most afraid of - and what many others are afraid of. We learn all of these concepts and teaching tactics with big names and bells and whistles that can really intimidate us along the way. Some of the concepts we learn, sure, I can write about them on a test. Can I apply them to my classroom? Do I truly understand why they work and how it will affect students of different levels and walks of life?
This summer, I have really taken the time to slowly read through the text to try to more deeply understand what it is that I want to try and apply as a teacher this upcoming year. As I apply it, I imagine, through inspiration of the readings, I will continue to try to deeper understand it as the years go on - adding to my experience.
We will have to help each other not to loose sight of this goal when it takes a back seat because tests and presentations put our blinders on. Good observation!
Sarah and Amanda, I'm completely with you!! In the plast couple years we've started hearing different key words and phrases that crop up in terms of education, and I sit there trying to puzzle out what it is people are talking about. One of the things I'm most excited for with PDS is being able to live these concepts and ideas for ourselves now!! I have feared interviews and have been afraid I will not be competitive enough to secure a job, but I have strong hope, especially after hearing what some of our professors had to say last Monday. Hearing that people who went through PDS "get" these concepts is incredibly uplifting! As long as we stay focused in our studies and put our best foot forward with our classroom experiences and work well with our mentor teachers in co-teaching, I really believe we can do this! So much can happen in a year, and it's so so exciting to think where we will be come the end of this year :)
“We are talking about the schools’ cultivating in the young that most ‘subversive’ intellectual instrument—the anthropological perspective. This perspective allows one to be part of his own culture and, at the same time, to be out of it” (4). Not only does our classroom have to change, but we must help our students to understand that society is “ever-renewing.” The moment you realize that most of what you may have learned a few years ago is now out of date is terrifying if you aren’t prepared for such a phenomenon. “Future shock” (14) is real. As many have said, this can partially be accomplished by asking students to stop following the “symbols and symbol-manipulating institutions of his tribe” (4) and think independently. Just as the world changes around us, our students might learn to keep an open mind and allow their ideas to change as they discover new information. This is not to say that in an acceptance of change we must reject the past. It may seem easy to think that if information and ideas will be out of date soon, there’s no sense in learning it. We must build on previous ideas and information in order to grow. It is important to get this idea across in the classroom. Postman stresses relevance. If students (and we who present the lessons) grasp this idea, concepts will be more readily engaging. Expect change, accept the new culture (which will be our struggle as our students’ worlds continually become foreign to us), but also learn from previous information—be it the words of Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, Orwell, or, for us, previous pedagogical theorists. As Postman states, “it is not what you say to people that counts; it is what you have them do” (19). I agree with Wes that much of the basic content (his ‘underlying truths’) remains constant. Still, with a rapidly evolving world, we must encourage our students to think differently about the information they receive. It cannot be a simple matter of passing tests with “Hamlet was contemplating suicide.” We need to make Postman proud that a classroom is not longer just a place where students sit and memorize whatever the ‘teacher’ says. The points beginning on page 34 are inspiring. However, I’m stuck with Kelsey’s question. I know that inquiry teaching is important, but how exactly can we implement it in the classroom in approved ways, particularly during co-teaching?
I think the best way to encourage this while teaching is remembering how easy it is to access information with the current technology that we have. Maybe while co-teaching most of this can be done within a lesson plan, but continued after school (which is ideal and shows real ownership over learning). While our co-teachers may be very firm in their lesson plans, we will get chances to do our own lessons as well, and within these plans we should be able to lay a base for future inquiry once we are the one teaching for the majority of classes. This is probably to our benefit anyways because it will ease students back into their original learning process, think four year old who never stops asking why. I think within literature it would be good to start with asking students to question characters or authors motives. While we are still directing the inquiry to an extent, it would be an easy way to encourage students to break free of the PSSA/SAT "here's a question and four options, which one is the correct answer" mindset.
Medium is message – environment has huge impact on content acquired Content and method are linked. It’s not what you say to your students but what you have them do. If you don’t do it, you don’t learn it. Similarity between mass-production industries and school environment.
**Shift focus from what you want to teach to what you want students to learn – shift focus from teacher to student.
Relevance – absolutely the best way to make a subject compelling, but how relevant is much of the stuff we need, the building blocks of which relevant study is formed?
“What’s worth knowing?” Indeed.
I found the Postman reading to be saying that we must always remember that education is an active, participatory endeavor for the learner. That it is easy for us to fall into the roles of giver and receiver, and many teachers and students do, but real learning happens when the student asks questions and makes discoveries. The idea of relevance is tied to that act of asking questions -- if someone asks a question, the answer is (almost by definition) relevant to the questioner.
The Inquiry Method (p 29) -- asserts that the episodic nature of media frees us to develop a fuller understanding of world – one must work hard “and one wants to, at discovering patterns… The focus of intellectual energy becomes theactive investigation of structures and relationship, rather than passive reception of someone else’s story.”
"One wants to?" Bullshit. Most people I talk to seem to prefer to passively receive someone else’s story, and these are the same people who hated school because they didn't want to be told what to do or what to think. Yes, many people in post-secondary school, especially in education, enjoy the "active investigation of structures and relationships," of discovering patterns; but they(we) are not the norm and do not represent the perspective of the majority of the students we will be guiding. Our challenge is to develop an approach to curriculum that leads students to Want To find out, to discover, to ask questions. Let's not fool ourselves into believing most people Want To do the work of discovery for themselves.
“But the fact is that many teachers of English are fearful of life and, incidentally, of children. They are pompous and precious, and are lovers of symmetry, categories, and proper labels.” (p 55) Charming. Likewise, I'm sure.
That last paragraph...HOOOO BOY. Hell, that might even be (as I described in the introductions thread) why I chose this major. I wanted to read classics and talk about classics and sit around drinking Woodford Reserve with people while doing it. Much to my horror, I discovered that I cannot legally share Woodford Reserve with high school students, and even if I could, they probably would be even less inclined than their typically low-inclined cognitive preferences to discuss English literature with me! How dare they!?! What am I even doing!?!?!
But wait!
If students are taught how to effectively take in (as well as spit out) print and other media sources...messages, forms of linguistic communication...anything language, folks...if they can do this with a certain literacy, if they can interpret things and sniff out meaning like the Nazgul sniffed around for the One Ring while it rested in the hands of an unlikely hobbit (although hopefully these students will be less dead and more successful than the ringwraiths [sorry for this analogy but Becca got me going with her Harry Potter one (and I've was always at odds with the Harry Potter kids during the peak of my Lord of the Rings fandom)])...
(what a mouthful)
...if they can do THIS, they have SO MUCH MORE of a valuable tool than merely knowing trivial information about who wrote what and whether or not The Doll House really is about feminism and or what the eyes in The Great Gatsby represent. I mean, these things are in their own contexts important, but we cannot belabor ourselves with individual meanings when everything can be easily looked up on a reference website--we need to teach things that students cannot memorize or plagiarize, things that will help them in situation after situation, in different contexts and what-not.
Sorry about that. Actual response to the reading pending, once I cool down a little.
Seth, interestingly enough, I only just read the Harry Potter books several weeks ago. I never even bothered when they were first being published because I was too busy re-reading my battered copies of Tolkien's far superior works. Don't worry HP fans, I do REALLY like Rowling's works too, but my first loves of literature are Tolkien and Lewis, and I just can't imagine ever breaking up with them.
It is articles such as these that succeed in making me feel even more anxious as I count down the weeks until I will be co-responsible for a classroom of students. It's easy to sit behind a computer screen and applaud as Postman tackles the issues of our education system - which, sadly, happen to be just as relevant today as they were when the article was written. I can say "yes! that is what I will do in my classroom!!!" a thousand times but, let's be honest, I have been so distant from the educational setting. I have no understanding of what it's like to try and lasso these wonderful concepts floating around above me and force them down to live practically in the schools of today, amidst all the regulations and standards (which seem to increase on a weekly basis). A teacher should not "'teach' something unless his students require it for some identifiable and important purpose, which is to say, for some purpose that is related to the life of the learner." Great point. Well, how can the decision of what content contains purpose for students - and I do believe that should rest upon the judgment of the teacher - be reconciled with the strict guidelines that have recently bled into the schools' curriculums? That said, I do think it is always necessary to have relevance tied into our message, which Postman dedicates a lot of space to in his article and many of you talk about in your posts, but I struggle with the resiliency of the current standards.
Moving on... Postman brings up another concept I feel worth mentioning since I have felt its absence in past classrooms I've observed, and that is of the importance in recognizing the openness of learning. Inquiry into the questions we present are not (or, at least, should not be) easily terminable; learning is a continual process and when we only choose to acknowledge the (nonexistent) "right answer," we close discussion and eliminate further thought/response. Of course, it's idealistic (and probably wrong) to assume that I will immediately be able to produce a classroom that is thriving with discussion; a more accurate portrayal of a classroom I will experience will most likely resemble more of a dentist's office where I am forced to pull teeth in order to get some sort of response from my students. But, hey, it's a goal to strive for then, right?
Postman really hits the nail on the head on page 11, cutting to the source of the problem. He discusses how it wasn't long ago that one could essentially live in their familiar bubble world for fifty-or-so years without having to challenge their own beliefs too extensively.
The thing is: is this a "problem," or is it merely a challenge?
See, it seems as though nations who outperform the U.S. in education are those whose populations are largely homogeneous; this leaves less room for conflicting ideas and experiences, so it's inevitably much easier to move from point a to point b, as far as objective testable data/knowledge goes.
Which leaves American schools, in which beliefs and experiences (even in a rather white/suburban high school like my alma matter) vary to such a vast degree that everything must be considered at every angle. This is ESPECIALLY important in an English classroom, where essentially students are being instructed to familiarize themselves with cultural traditions through texts and mythologies, old and new. How beautiful, though! In this environment, the objective seems to have become more about teaching kids how to think than what to think; how do we become negotiators with our past and present, with the millions of different experiences around us?
There's the "challenge." A student will be more prepared for having gone through it, though. I recently took a lit class in which most of the tested information was trivia; fifteen minutes on sparknotes was quite literally more effective than three hours with the source text itself. I chalk this up to the teacher being from the era before google, before vast computer databases of trivia and facts. These are the things that can be recorded and transmitted simply; experience cannot.
One of the biggest things that blew me away in this reading was the quote on page 1. This was the main lesson that I pulled away from the reading after it introduced the importance of democracy. It says, “...our schools are instruments of such a society, they must develop in the young not only an awareness of this freedom but a will to exercise it, and the intellectual power and perspective to do so effectively. This is necessary so that the society may continue to change and modify itself to meet unforeseen threats, problems, and opportunities.”
I came to the realization after reading this that teachers have the responsibility of building citizens of our country. That’s my job as a teacher - filling the United States with upstanding citizens who can think for themselves to better our country. We are responsible for instilling morals, techniques and tools, and responsibility in the students that we teach each and every day, no matter what the subject.
If this is the goal, Postman also brings up that education must be constant and active. As teachers, we must teach our students to continuously seek to further their knowledge of all subjects in life. To actively pursue new knowledge encourages students to develop problem solving skills that will soften the blow of “future shock.” Reading over this article makes me nervous because, as you all know, one of the first things Postman does is to lay out all of the horrors taking place in education and the world. They are all as relevant now as they were then. It calms me to know that as long as I approach the classroom setting as a lifelong learning experience, I can instill these ideas and skills in my students as I learn to use them myself. It is time for me to be co-responsible for a classroom - that doesn’t mean it is time for me to stop learning.
Out of the entire reading, what made me stop and think the most was the start of Chapter Four, Pursuing Relevance. The chapter begins with a humorous scene in which doctors talk amongst one another in terms of their patients and different treatments they have prescribed for them. There is gall bladder-happy Kildear, Carstairs, whose patients died despite his penicillin approach,etc etc. The scene did an amazing job, in my opinion, of showing through another profession how truly absurd it is how some teachers approach their own profession. Some humorous quotes that made me both laugh and think were: "the prospect of doing pilonidal-cyst excisions brought you into medicine," "I just thought that penicillin would help the get better...each one was awful sick, Chief, and I know penicillin helps sick people get better," and "penicillin never fails to work on good patients".
Each one of us has been attracted to the teaching profession through slightly different ways, but just because you adore Shakespeare doesn't mean you need to shove the Bard down every student's throat in every type of situation. Likewise, just because one approach helps some students, doesn't mean it will help all students in all situations. Teachers need to assess each situation independently of other occurrences and know the exact circumstances rather than blindly prescribing "solutions" to every student.
The last quote I included really makes my skin crawl....that is, the assumption of "good" patients, or students. When I am a teacher I will have no good students and no bad students. I will have students that learn in one way, and students that learn another way. And a third, fourth and fifth way too. The idea that a teacher "did all they could" for a student and it still wasn't enough doesn't jive with me. I strongly believe that every student has the capacity to learn, and as a teacher it is my job to figure out how to help that child become successful. Maybe it's a different learning style or teaching method. Maybe it's helping him or her understand the directions being asked of him or her. Maybe it's giving him or her a reason to care, if they haven't had one before. But the notion of a child being a "bad" student is absurd. Maybe they need help focusing. It's my job to help them focus then. Maybe they are anxious test-takers. It's my job to help them relax and feel comforts led then. Maybe they have decided long ago that school is stupid and they will never "waste" their time cracking open a book. It's my job then to show them the merit in taking that first step, I re-kindling a desire to learn.
I believe all people are inquisitive by nature. It's why young children incessantly ask questions: why is the sky blue? How does Santa get around the world in one night? Why? Why? Why?! School and education should help them answer these questions, the ones that are important to them. Like Postman said later in the piece, "unless an inquiry is perceived as relevant by the learner, no significant learning will take place" (52). It's all about relativity, about relating with the students and making learning important to them. It's easy for a teacher to say that they taught a student, but he didn't learn the material. However, it takes a great teacher to invest the time and effort in finding what will touch a student's heart and internally motivate him or her to want to care.
One of, I think, the most important issues this article discusses is the fact that our nation's schools are THE institutions that prepare the next generation to become a part of the greater society. Do kids get an education elsewhere? Of course they do. From the time that they are born they are learning from their parents and the loved ones that surround them. They may also be learning valuable skills at a part time job, but, the fact remains that, "school is the one institution that is inflicted on everybody," (p. 3).
This is one of the things that I cite the most when I get into unfortunate political conversations about taxes and where our money should go. I am constantly at a loss as to why the government has such a hard time funding the foundation of our future in our schools. If our schools aren't getting the money they need, our kids (and therefore our future) have a more difficult time getting the education that they need, and you end up churning out young adults that are ill-prepared to make important scientific breakthroughs, or develop a cure for cancer; or you get young adults that don't have the emotional capacity or well-roundedness to care for the elderly, and they may have had such a terrible time in the school system that no one wants to teach! I know, I'm definitely being overly dramatic, but the fact remains, schools are our weapon to fight for a better future and they are, therefore, our most important asset.
I think "subversiveness" comes into the picture when we realize that schools are very much a part of the politics game. The education system has always been a pawn in the political careers of our government officials, and there will always be talk about how education can be a tool to improve our status within the world's economy. Because of this, I fear that there will always be mandates coming down from people who have no idea how children learn and love to learn, telling teachers and schools what they can and can't do. Enter subversiveness. When I dreamt of being a teacher, I thought about all of the amazing ways I would get my kids to make connections. I thought about all of the cool books we would read, and all the different texts I could pull from. The reality is that teaching has become more rigid in its quest for standardization that possibly ever before. In a world that must compete with itself to be at the top of science and mathematics, schools have had to become preoccupied with meeting testing standards, often to the detriment of real, meaningful learning. So, today, being a teacher means knowing how to work around the system. It means being subversive. It means sneaking things into the curriculum that you know your kids will love, but the standard-writers will hate. It means meeting those standards (to keep your job), but twisting them around in ways that can make them applicable to the lives of teenagers.
I think teaching has become more difficult in the past decade or so, but I also think that it will be that much more rewarding.
I was amazed the issues talked about in the article were so similar to the current ones. I found a lot of similar ideas in two of the books I read last semester "The Language-Rich classroom" and "Total participation Techniques". We, as future teachers, have to make sure every single student is engaged and actively participates during the lesson. Disengaged students are usually the ones disliking school and not seeing the point of going at all, which results in dropping out. I found a lot of great ideas for total participation classroom where every student voices their opinion in a comfortable environment. Teachers have to provide ways for students to be actively,cognitively and emotionally engaged.I hope to be able to use these techniques during my internship and see if they actually work well in engaging all the students!
As soon as I started to read this article, I was intrigued by the whole "crap detection" and change topics of conversation. The article brings up some good points, but also brings my greatest fears to surface: how will we engage the majority of our students throughout every lesson? With technology and interests growing and changing at an irreversible, rapid rate, we will need to update our teaching methods as well. Think about it: over the past 50 years, so much has changed in terms of resources and ideas, but what we teach and how we teach has, in many ways, stayed the same. If we can't keep up with the times, how can we expect to keep students engaged?
ReplyDeleteI guess it brings me back to my experience with the mini lesson presentations in the freshman comp classes. I'm not sure how many have you heard, but mine went terribly. No one participated, and I didn't come prepared with backup plans, so my entire lesson blew up in my face. Lesson learned, but how do we deal if none of our plans work, or if what seems interesting and engaging to us is boring and lame to our students? I love the one quote in the text that goes, "a classroom is an environment and the way it is organized carries the burden of what people will learn from it" (18). So, that being said, it is up to US to create the classroom and activities to make sure the students stay interested enough to take the lessons for what they are.
But, this just brings me with even more questions: what is that ideal environment? Is there a universal technique, or do we have to make sure to keep up with current trends and interests? (this goes back along with the entire idea of change that the reading talked about) How do we deal with resistant students? Maybe I just worry too much, but this article really makes me anxious about teaching next year.
Sam, I think it's awesome that you had that experience with your mini lesson!! It may have seemed disastrous at the time, but I believe your experience may have been more useful this way than if it had gone well! You now have that experience and have learned from it, which will greatly benefit yourself and your future students!! I know what you mean about being anxious for this year, but I also believe that through sticking it out and dealing with circumstances as they arise, we will become much better prepared and experienced teachers, something that will conitinue to only improve with time :)
DeleteEven though this article was written in the late 1960s, I found so much in it that is relevant today. Two points that particularly stuck out to me were the ideas that students need to be able to detect what information is vital for them to retain and really "know" as opposed to what may need to be filtered and that we are in an era that could primarily be described as episodic rather than linear or sequential.
ReplyDeleteThe first point focuses on students and the qualities of a "good learner." Postman points out that in the current school system of his day, students were expected to passively absorb information, learn the "right" or "agreed upon" answers to pass some tests, and then forget everything they had learned. Afterall, once you've "had" it, you are immune and don't need to take a course in that subject again. Honestly, that is a horrifying way to approach education because it goes against everything that humans do, which is to progress and improve their situation through invention and intellect. What concerns me most as I enter into a year of student teaching is whether or not I am capable of showing students that real learning is about discovering our world and what it means to be human, rather than getting good grades that teachers decide on.
The second point concerning our episodic society was not a new concept for me, but I did have a mini-revelation in regards to its connection with HOW students learn. It's true that most courses are laid out in a sequential pattern, because it makes sense that we build upon concepts as the year progresses. However, it was an important reminder to me that learners are picking up numerous concepts simultaneously in all of their courses and that there may be some areas in which they excel rapidly while other aspects need some time to catch up. I want to keep this in mind during my student teaching because even though it may look like a student completely missed a concept and won't be able to understand material later down the road, it's just as possible that their "aha" moment is yet to come, because further foundational work needs to happen for them before they can grasp a concept.
A last quote that I would like to point out is this: "As the number of messages increases, the amount of information carried decreases. We have more media to communicate fewer significant ideas" (8). Keep in mind that this was written in 1968, before the Internet was even around. This is an interesting statement that almost seems contradictory to the basis of the article when translated to today's world. Postman is asking teachers to "pursue relevance" yet be wary of using a medium that may be severely lacking in terms of content albeit trendy and popular. I take this as a challenge to incorporate technology and media into my classroom while digging deep into ideas and issues instead of giving attention to a fancy layout, catchy blog posts, or hip sensationalism.
I thought Postman's arguments about the influences of mass media on society and education were fascinating. His main point, mass media outlets like television and radio offer simplified versions of history and can be manipulated easily to create propaganda, seems as relevant today as when he wrote it nearly fifty years ago. I wonder how Postman would view newer forms of communication, mainly the internet. Because newspapers, television and radio are passive forms of communication, viewers or readers absorb whatever tidbits of information given to them. Postman did not like the fact that these forms of communication offered no room for thoughtful discourse and could not effectively relate the entirety of the information. I wonder how Postman would view the internet, which has given citizens an open public forum to discuss the information that used to be simply given to them as pure facts.
ReplyDeletePostman's views on technology do not directly relate to the classroom, but I think they relate to an effective classroom. Like Postman, I believe that education becomes mindless propaganda if the teacher leaves no room for thoughtful discourse of the information. As teachers, we must instill a sense of thoughtfulness in students so that they can prevent what Postman described as, entropy in our society. I think that is the role of our education system, and our primary duty as teachers.
Mark,
DeleteI absolutely love love love what you brought to this discussion. I agree with majority of what Postman brings to light when he begins talking about what you say is “mindless propaganda” in education. As you believe we need to “instill a sense of thoughtfulness in students” so that they can see the world for what it is, Postman believes the same but explains it under his “crap detecting” allusion to Hemingway. This allusion goes straight into his desire for students to gain the “anthropological perspective…that allows one to be part of his own culture and, at the same time, be out of it.” Which is beautiful, which is exhilarating, which is being an active participant and life long learner when you live in a constant state of inquiry of your world! This is what we as teachers want for our students. I’d love to hand out “crap-detector badges” to the ones who grow to become this in my classroom.
Crap detector badges would be awesome!
DeleteThe Postman reading succeeded in reminding me once again how complex teaching can be.
ReplyDelete"Once you have learned how to ask questions-- relevant and appropriate and substantial questions- you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know."
Out of the entire Postman reading, I believe this single sentence is the most important. In traditional schools students are given information from either a textbook or a teacher, they are told to memorize that information and then forced to regurgitate it in a paper or on a test, and that is considered learning. Everyone knows what it's like to cram last minute for a test, vomit up the answers, and then never think about that information ever again. That is not learning and it should not be considered education.
Every teacher's goal is to create life long learners, and the only way that will happen is if we take Postman's advice and cultivate students who feel safe enough to be proactive, interrogative, and creative in and out of the classroom.
Ashley, I highlighted this quote as well!! Questions certainly are the key to learning because it implies engaged students and people that yearn to know more. What more could teachers want?? I know when I was in high school I was known as the girl who asked questions, and this embarrassed me for a bit until I realized I didn't care what other people thought. It is up to us, as teachers, to create a classroom environment
DeleteI really enjoyed reading this article. I view teaching as a job that revolves around challenging yourself, and your students, so I immediately agreed with many things that this article was saying. I loved the quote by Alfred North White which pointed out that while generations are taught values and ideas by their forefathers that will have an effect on the way that they live; this generation cannot rely on these old values and ideas because of the rate at which things are changing. I think that this should be in the back of every teachers mind because as a teacher it’s important to realize that what you are teaching may or may not be relevant to their actual lives, so instead, teachers must focus on encouraging students to think for themselves. The only way to truly prepare students for the future is to do this, especially because we probably won’t be able to even imagine what the future holds for many of our students, whether it be new technology, medicine, science, or social views. This seems so simple now that we are young and living with this changing world almost alongside our students, but as we age and continue to get new students around the same ages, they will be facing an entirely different world from the one that we grew up with and learned to live in.
ReplyDeleteI think that working with the inquiry method of teaching will be a new challenge every day, which is how teaching (and learning) should be. Asking questions is so important to everyday life, and true learning. Children begin their learning by asking questions like, “what is that?” or “why?” so the idea of asking questions to learn should come naturally to many students once they are comfortable in their learning environment.
I really liked Mark’s input on how Postman would view the internet as a way of communication as well as mass media. I think that he would be somewhat torn on his views. For one thing, it’s just another way for students to have to be “crap detectors.” What is true and relevant are sometimes harder to judge while reading something online. On the other hand, Postman was concerned about mass media being a one-way communication, which isn’t necessarily true on the internet. After many articles online there is a comment section, so there is a kind of way to reflect and ask questions, but this can also turn into pointless arguments, with no real lead to finding actual information or knowledge. The good thing about this, for us, is that our students will probably have looked at articles online, maybe even replied to them, and have read replies from others, so they may have an easier time at seeing media as something to be questioned, and therefore information in general as something to be questioned. I hope that once students are comfortable and realize that questions are encouraged and, in fact, required to learn that they will naturally flow into this kind of learning.
My main question after reading this article is how can we implement this during co-teaching? We will all obviously have some lessons that we must stick to in order to fulfill our requirements in student teaching as well as meet the requirements of our curriculum, but I think that we can do this on a smaller scale where we encourage students to ask questions inside our lesson plans that are relevant to the curriculum as well as their lives. This will hopefully give students more ownership over what they are learning in school, as well as still make the school board happy because we have “covered” their required material.
Kelsey, your comments got me thinking and revisiting some ideas that have cropped up during the past two years at Millersville. I have some thoughts in response:
DeleteIt is seductive to think that we live in a new world. One has only to look around to notice that it seems that we know so much more than we ever did and that we are applying our knowledge in so many new and unprecedented ways. Information (and disinformation, and misinformation) is more easily discovered and distributed than ever before. Technology continues to develop at an exponential pace, and this appears to be driving social change on a massive scale. As a result, it seems logical to say "this generation cannot rely on these old values and ideas because of the rate at which things are changing." While I understand the impulse, I disagree with the statement.
The Postman text was published in 1968, a time of great social change in the US and elsewhere. On the surface, a lot of the content is a product of the times: references to Vietnam and Black Power, a male-centric perspective. But the underlying theme of taking a 'subversive' approach to learning is, in my opinion, a bit of a historical constant. Rejecting established norms and concepts was as fashionable among young, idealistic people then as it is now, and as much as it has always been (my parents did this to a certain degree in '68; I did it to a degree in '88; Millersville students are encouraged to do it in '13 [and doesn't it strike your inner rebel as suspicious that an established Institution is encouraging us to be subversive?! There's a topic for a bull session!]). The idea that the world is changing too rapidly for the past to have much relevance was not a new concept, even in 1968 (Age of Enlightenment, anyone?).
So, if the impulse to reject the past is nothing new, and uncertainty about the form of the future is nothing new, perhaps it is short-sighted to reject out of hand the values and ideas of the past. I submit that the values and ideas of the past are all we have to work with, and I will argue until closing time for the content teachers are required to 'cover' (if we have no idea what kind of future our students are facing, how can we (or they) decide what is or is not relevant?). Much of what gives us the impression of living in a new world is cosmetic. The differences are mostly surface-level; 'New and Improved' rarely is. The underlying truths -- people need to be able to communicate, to parse out possible truth from apparent fiction, to have an agile mind in order to adapt to changing circumstances -- have not changed, ever. What the authors are rejecting is not the ideas, values, or content, but the complacent approach educators and students take to learning. The inquiry method of learning (notice I didn't say teaching) has always existed; it seems like a natural instinct and I think we may be surprised at how easily we incorporate it into our classrooms.
HOLY HARRY POTTER. While reading Harry Potter, you see crap detecting at its finest. You are banded together with Harry to discover that you must constantly question what’s being told in the media. In the Order of the Phoenix Cornelius Fudge and the Ministry of Magic put all their energy in lying to the public that Voldemort—the biggest threat to the community’s lives—is back at large. They love being safe and pretending the world is not changing; as Postman would say, they are “The repositories of conventional assumptions and standard practices—two of the greatest accelerators of entropy.” Dolores Umbridge is our present day representation of education. If that doesn’t make you want to punch something or realize how important it is that we educate for inquiry-driven students and not complacent repositories of facts that go in one ear and out the other than I hope you meet a Blast-Ended Skrewt (too far? Nah haha).
ReplyDeleteHarry Potter proves that a “subversive” education is possible! Albeit challenging and NOT incredibly new of an idea (as we all have somewhat admitted to in our responses that an inquiry based education is not all that new a view), but the problem is “to get a hearing for them [the idea].” Harry, Dumbledore, and the entire Order serves as the “Anti-bureaucracy Bureaucracy” that has a perspective on its own society—a “What is it Good for?” attitude. They crap-detected the crap out of the Ministry from the very beginning! But it was getting heard that was the most challenging, but also the most rewarding once it happened.
Let’s put this in our classrooms, guys.
Let’s get our students to see the beauty of questioning their worlds, because it’s possible. Let’s build our own Dumbledore Armies with subversive education, because it what education needs to revitalize society away from the mindlessness.
Woohoo! This is wonderful! I like your point that subversive education is challenging, yet possible. It is essential to have students question the world they live in. It's as simple as switching the question from "Who discovered how to apparate?" to "How do you discover who discovered how to apparate?" (from Postman reading, with a little revision). Wait! You mean the teacher isn't just telling us anymore? We have to figure it out for ourselves?
DeleteI am reminded of Dumbledore's brilliance in allowing Harry to come to many of his conclusions on his own. He pointed him in the right direction, but just gave Harry enough information to cause him to find out on his own because he understood that "learning is a happening in itself" (Postman).
And I'm right there with you Becca, let's teach our kids to crap detect the crap out of crap!
This is such an awesome analogy that I have chills as I read it!
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI love what everybody has talked about so far with the Postman reading, and I will respectfully try not to repeat subjects because that would be just plain redundant and boring; a waste of time.
ReplyDeleteSomething I found noteworthy and important is the discussion on naming. I have a negative view towards labels because of our habit of overusing them to the point that they become trite. We like to think that if we find the right label for some process or idea, we must then know all about that thing. This is completely ridiculous, and highlights a tendency to confuse knowledge with definition and memorization. I like how Postman cautioned against thinking this way. Names are a way of categorizing things to give us the ability to refer to ideas without describing it every time. But soon the name becomes the idea, replacing the actual practice and process of the idea. “While giving names to things, obviously, is an indispensible human activity, it can be a dangerous one, especially when you are trying to understand a complex and delicate process” (p.26). Now that is something we would do well to remember.
We are about to embark upon a great journey. We will be learning all sorts of teaching styles and terminology to aid us as future teachers. This information will be invaluable to us as long as we remember that we need to focus more on understanding the concepts and how to work with them than on memorizing their names and thinking we understand the theories. “The medium is a process, not a thing.” That means we must work to understand the concepts and workings of the process. I have a very hard time remembering the certain names for introducing an idea to students at the beginning of a lesson or class period, but that does not stop me from knowing the importance of said activities, and I may even utilize them “unknowingly” despite my inability to remember the official title.
My point is, the name is just a way to categorize our ideas. If I think I understand something completely based on the title given to the method, I will most likely not really understand everything about the actual process. It may make me look good at parties, as people will note the ease with which I bandy about different terms of highly regarded teaching methods in such a sangfroid manner, but that will ultimately gain me very little in the end. I would rather struggle to remember the “correct” term than not understand or be unable to utilize in the field the right process for teaching and instruction. I want to help feed inquisitive minds and spark curiosity in minds less inclined to question. I think that is called teaching.
I'm with Jesse in valuing the understanding and application of a process or an approach over memorizing the label for the process/approach.
DeleteSure, it's easier for me to communicate what I'm doing if I can put a recognizable label on it ("I'm using this device to generate microwave energy to excite the water molecules in the food I've placed inside." or "I'm nuking a brownie."), but it is much more important to understand why I'm doing something and how to do it than to give it a name. I toenail wood on a regular basis, and I understand that driving nails at an angle to join two boards builds a much stronger joint than other options. More importantly, I know that I can use this method to move stubborn boards into their proper position and I can make adjustments to a joint using the same approach, even after the joint has been established improperly. If I never knew this was called 'toenailing', I would be no less effective a carpenter. If all I knew was that driving nails in at an angle was called 'toenailing', I would not be as effective a carpenter.
(What's he mumbling about? http://www.wikihow.com/Toenail-Wood)
Awkward examples aside, I think this is an important point to remember when designing lessons (and assessments!!). Students need to understand how and why much more than they need to remember when and who.
Jesse, I found your comments on the nature of names intriguing and an important concept to consider. Names, and more importantly labels can easily become meaningless when the idea behind them is lost or misinterpreted. While reading your comment, I thought of the numerous buzzwords that are flashed before our eyes in our consumer society. That appear everywhere from billboards to the front page headlines. Complete divorced from meaning, a word, or a name can become a tool for misinformation. Words and names losing and gaining new meanings is not a good or a bad thing, but like Jesse said, everyone must understand the underlying ideas behind them.
DeleteWes, I like your analogy of the dovetail. It demonstrates to me that you understand the concept I was teaching, and proves that you can do more than just recite facts. You receive an A for your reply. Keep up the good work! ;)
DeleteMark, isn't it interesting how quickly words or ideas can lose their meaning or have it change completely? It's the natural process of a living language, but it takes a lot of work to keep up with sometimes, and I often find myself feeling disgruntled that words are used differently (or as I see it, misused) and I want to revert to the old, better way. Well here's a little tidbit that may be helpful for us English types to remember. If we get too worked up with trying to halt the progress of language change (which we cannot, no matter how hard we try) we are only working against the natural progression of language. There is no "perfect" way to speak English. Chaucer liked double and triple (and sometimes more) negatives, and people of his time liked aks instead of ask, and brid instead of bird. If we think that trying to maintain a grip on proper English is important, we should probably at least adhere to the oldest form of English, which is somewhat ridiculous to modern speakers. So there you have it, don't prescribe, describe. Teach students how to write according to the "proper standards" of the day, but let's not get too crazy with making sure they "write correctly," because, as it turns out, the correct way may soon be out of style.
Whoops, I tend to get carried away when talking about words and language.
"...that we need to focus more on understanding the concepts and how to work with them than on memorizing their names and thinking we understand the theories."
DeleteTHIS QUOTE. After slowly reading through Postman (I've been reading bits and pieces of both readings over this incredibly busy summer) and all of these responses to the reading I think this is seriously one of the most important concepts we could take away from this discussion.
Simply put, I believe this completely wraps up all of my fears about entering a classroom. We're all college students here so we completely understand the difference between learning something's name and actually understanding it at a deep enough level to go out and perform it. I can't even begin to count the amount of tests I've taken in which I've been able to spout off terms and describe them to you but would completely fail if the test was one that judged my skill level while performing that term.
I think back to Ed Psych. All of the vast amount of information regarding student's differing levels of psychological ability and the stages of development, would I truly be able to recognize these withing my real-live students, not just textbook examples? I can tell you the names and labels of just about anything I learned in that class, but what does that really help me with in the classroom unless I understand the concepts behind them?
I also go back to Bloom's Taxonomy. It's a higher level of thinking that is required of us. Instead of simple knowledge we need to be able to comprehend and apply this knowledge. We also need to be aware of how we as teachers instruct our future students, and make sure we keep them out of the educational pitfall of knowledge without action.
Sarah,
DeleteI think you completely touched on what I am most afraid of - and what many others are afraid of. We learn all of these concepts and teaching tactics with big names and bells and whistles that can really intimidate us along the way. Some of the concepts we learn, sure, I can write about them on a test. Can I apply them to my classroom? Do I truly understand why they work and how it will affect students of different levels and walks of life?
This summer, I have really taken the time to slowly read through the text to try to more deeply understand what it is that I want to try and apply as a teacher this upcoming year. As I apply it, I imagine, through inspiration of the readings, I will continue to try to deeper understand it as the years go on - adding to my experience.
We will have to help each other not to loose sight of this goal when it takes a back seat because tests and presentations put our blinders on. Good observation!
Sarah and Amanda, I'm completely with you!! In the plast couple years we've started hearing different key words and phrases that crop up in terms of education, and I sit there trying to puzzle out what it is people are talking about. One of the things I'm most excited for with PDS is being able to live these concepts and ideas for ourselves now!! I have feared interviews and have been afraid I will not be competitive enough to secure a job, but I have strong hope, especially after hearing what some of our professors had to say last Monday. Hearing that people who went through PDS "get" these concepts is incredibly uplifting! As long as we stay focused in our studies and put our best foot forward with our classroom experiences and work well with our mentor teachers in co-teaching, I really believe we can do this! So much can happen in a year, and it's so so exciting to think where we will be come the end of this year :)
Delete“We are talking about the schools’ cultivating in the young that most ‘subversive’ intellectual instrument—the anthropological perspective. This perspective allows one to be part of his own culture and, at the same time, to be out of it” (4).
ReplyDeleteNot only does our classroom have to change, but we must help our students to understand that society is “ever-renewing.” The moment you realize that most of what you may have learned a few years ago is now out of date is terrifying if you aren’t prepared for such a phenomenon. “Future shock” (14) is real. As many have said, this can partially be accomplished by asking students to stop following the “symbols and symbol-manipulating institutions of his tribe” (4) and think independently. Just as the world changes around us, our students might learn to keep an open mind and allow their ideas to change as they discover new information. This is not to say that in an acceptance of change we must reject the past. It may seem easy to think that if information and ideas will be out of date soon, there’s no sense in learning it. We must build on previous ideas and information in order to grow. It is important to get this idea across in the classroom. Postman stresses relevance. If students (and we who present the lessons) grasp this idea, concepts will be more readily engaging. Expect change, accept the new culture (which will be our struggle as our students’ worlds continually become foreign to us), but also learn from previous information—be it the words of Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, Orwell, or, for us, previous pedagogical theorists.
As Postman states, “it is not what you say to people that counts; it is what you have them do” (19). I agree with Wes that much of the basic content (his ‘underlying truths’) remains constant. Still, with a rapidly evolving world, we must encourage our students to think differently about the information they receive. It cannot be a simple matter of passing tests with “Hamlet was contemplating suicide.” We need to make Postman proud that a classroom is not longer just a place where students sit and memorize whatever the ‘teacher’ says. The points beginning on page 34 are inspiring. However, I’m stuck with Kelsey’s question. I know that inquiry teaching is important, but how exactly can we implement it in the classroom in approved ways, particularly during co-teaching?
I think the best way to encourage this while teaching is remembering how easy it is to access information with the current technology that we have. Maybe while co-teaching most of this can be done within a lesson plan, but continued after school (which is ideal and shows real ownership over learning). While our co-teachers may be very firm in their lesson plans, we will get chances to do our own lessons as well, and within these plans we should be able to lay a base for future inquiry once we are the one teaching for the majority of classes. This is probably to our benefit anyways because it will ease students back into their original learning process, think four year old who never stops asking why. I think within literature it would be good to start with asking students to question characters or authors motives. While we are still directing the inquiry to an extent, it would be an easy way to encourage students to break free of the PSSA/SAT "here's a question and four options, which one is the correct answer" mindset.
DeleteHighlights/notes:
ReplyDeletePublished in 1968 and nothing has changed.
Medium is message – environment has huge impact on content acquired
Content and method are linked.
It’s not what you say to your students but what you have them do.
If you don’t do it, you don’t learn it.
Similarity between mass-production industries and school environment.
**Shift focus from what you want to teach to what you want students to learn – shift focus from teacher to student.
Relevance – absolutely the best way to make a subject compelling, but how relevant is much of the stuff we need, the building blocks of which relevant study is formed?
“What’s worth knowing?” Indeed.
I found the Postman reading to be saying that we must always remember that education is an active, participatory endeavor for the learner. That it is easy for us to fall into the roles of giver and receiver, and many teachers and students do, but real learning happens when the student asks questions and makes discoveries. The idea of relevance is tied to that act of asking questions -- if someone asks a question, the answer is (almost by definition) relevant to the questioner.
The Inquiry Method (p 29) -- asserts that the episodic nature of media frees us to develop a fuller understanding of world – one must work hard “and one wants to, at discovering patterns… The focus of intellectual energy becomes theactive investigation of structures and relationship, rather than passive reception of someone else’s story.”
"One wants to?" Bullshit. Most people I talk to seem to prefer to passively receive someone else’s story, and these are the same people who hated school because they didn't want to be told what to do or what to think. Yes, many people in post-secondary school, especially in education, enjoy the "active investigation of structures and relationships," of discovering patterns; but they(we) are not the norm and do not represent the perspective of the majority of the students we will be guiding. Our challenge is to develop an approach to curriculum that leads students to Want To find out, to discover, to ask questions. Let's not fool ourselves into believing most people Want To do the work of discovery for themselves.
“But the fact is that many teachers of English are fearful of life and, incidentally, of children. They are pompous and precious, and are lovers of symmetry, categories, and proper labels.” (p 55) Charming. Likewise, I'm sure.
That last paragraph...HOOOO BOY. Hell, that might even be (as I described in the introductions thread) why I chose this major. I wanted to read classics and talk about classics and sit around drinking Woodford Reserve with people while doing it. Much to my horror, I discovered that I cannot legally share Woodford Reserve with high school students, and even if I could, they probably would be even less inclined than their typically low-inclined cognitive preferences to discuss English literature with me! How dare they!?! What am I even doing!?!?!
DeleteBut wait!
If students are taught how to effectively take in (as well as spit out) print and other media sources...messages, forms of linguistic communication...anything language, folks...if they can do this with a certain literacy, if they can interpret things and sniff out meaning like the Nazgul sniffed around for the One Ring while it rested in the hands of an unlikely hobbit (although hopefully these students will be less dead and more successful than the ringwraiths [sorry for this analogy but Becca got me going with her Harry Potter one (and I've was always at odds with the Harry Potter kids during the peak of my Lord of the Rings fandom)])...
(what a mouthful)
...if they can do THIS, they have SO MUCH MORE of a valuable tool than merely knowing trivial information about who wrote what and whether or not The Doll House really is about feminism and or what the eyes in The Great Gatsby represent. I mean, these things are in their own contexts important, but we cannot belabor ourselves with individual meanings when everything can be easily looked up on a reference website--we need to teach things that students cannot memorize or plagiarize, things that will help them in situation after situation, in different contexts and what-not.
Sorry about that. Actual response to the reading pending, once I cool down a little.
Seth, interestingly enough, I only just read the Harry Potter books several weeks ago. I never even bothered when they were first being published because I was too busy re-reading my battered copies of Tolkien's far superior works. Don't worry HP fans, I do REALLY like Rowling's works too, but my first loves of literature are Tolkien and Lewis, and I just can't imagine ever breaking up with them.
DeleteIt is articles such as these that succeed in making me feel even more anxious as I count down the weeks until I will be co-responsible for a classroom of students. It's easy to sit behind a computer screen and applaud as Postman tackles the issues of our education system - which, sadly, happen to be just as relevant today as they were when the article was written. I can say "yes! that is what I will do in my classroom!!!" a thousand times but, let's be honest, I have been so distant from the educational setting. I have no understanding of what it's like to try and lasso these wonderful concepts floating around above me and force them down to live practically in the schools of today, amidst all the regulations and standards (which seem to increase on a weekly basis). A teacher should not "'teach' something unless his students require it for some identifiable and important purpose, which is to say, for some purpose that is related to the life of the learner." Great point. Well, how can the decision of what content contains purpose for students - and I do believe that should rest upon the judgment of the teacher - be reconciled with the strict guidelines that have recently bled into the schools' curriculums? That said, I do think it is always necessary to have relevance tied into our message, which Postman dedicates a lot of space to in his article and many of you talk about in your posts, but I struggle with the resiliency of the current standards.
ReplyDeleteMoving on... Postman brings up another concept I feel worth mentioning since I have felt its absence in past classrooms I've observed, and that is of the importance in recognizing the openness of learning. Inquiry into the questions we present are not (or, at least, should not be) easily terminable; learning is a continual process and when we only choose to acknowledge the (nonexistent) "right answer," we close discussion and eliminate further thought/response. Of course, it's idealistic (and probably wrong) to assume that I will immediately be able to produce a classroom that is thriving with discussion; a more accurate portrayal of a classroom I will experience will most likely resemble more of a dentist's office where I am forced to pull teeth in order to get some sort of response from my students. But, hey, it's a goal to strive for then, right?
Is there a link to the Postman article? Does that question make me sound like a noob?
ReplyDeleteTom
I sent it to your email in May, Tom. I will send again. Look for it. :)
DeleteLate addition (edition?):
ReplyDeletePostman really hits the nail on the head on page 11, cutting to the source of the problem. He discusses how it wasn't long ago that one could essentially live in their familiar bubble world for fifty-or-so years without having to challenge their own beliefs too extensively.
The thing is: is this a "problem," or is it merely a challenge?
See, it seems as though nations who outperform the U.S. in education are those whose populations are largely homogeneous; this leaves less room for conflicting ideas and experiences, so it's inevitably much easier to move from point a to point b, as far as objective testable data/knowledge goes.
Which leaves American schools, in which beliefs and experiences (even in a rather white/suburban high school like my alma matter) vary to such a vast degree that everything must be considered at every angle. This is ESPECIALLY important in an English classroom, where essentially students are being instructed to familiarize themselves with cultural traditions through texts and mythologies, old and new. How beautiful, though! In this environment, the objective seems to have become more about teaching kids how to think than what to think; how do we become negotiators with our past and present, with the millions of different experiences around us?
There's the "challenge." A student will be more prepared for having gone through it, though. I recently took a lit class in which most of the tested information was trivia; fifteen minutes on sparknotes was quite literally more effective than three hours with the source text itself. I chalk this up to the teacher being from the era before google, before vast computer databases of trivia and facts. These are the things that can be recorded and transmitted simply; experience cannot.
One of the biggest things that blew me away in this reading was the quote on page 1. This was the main lesson that I pulled away from the reading after it introduced the importance of democracy. It says, “...our schools are instruments of such a society, they must develop in the young not only an awareness of this freedom but a will to exercise it, and the intellectual power and perspective to do so effectively. This is necessary so that the society may continue to change and modify itself to meet unforeseen threats, problems, and opportunities.”
ReplyDeleteI came to the realization after reading this that teachers have the responsibility of building citizens of our country. That’s my job as a teacher - filling the United States with upstanding citizens who can think for themselves to better our country. We are responsible for instilling morals, techniques and tools, and responsibility in the students that we teach each and every day, no matter what the subject.
If this is the goal, Postman also brings up that education must be constant and active. As teachers, we must teach our students to continuously seek to further their knowledge of all subjects in life. To actively pursue new knowledge encourages students to develop problem solving skills that will soften the blow of “future shock.” Reading over this article makes me nervous because, as you all know, one of the first things Postman does is to lay out all of the horrors taking place in education and the world. They are all as relevant now as they were then. It calms me to know that as long as I approach the classroom setting as a lifelong learning experience, I can instill these ideas and skills in my students as I learn to use them myself. It is time for me to be co-responsible for a classroom - that doesn’t mean it is time for me to stop learning.
Out of the entire reading, what made me stop and think the most was the start of Chapter Four, Pursuing Relevance. The chapter begins with a humorous scene in which doctors talk amongst one another in terms of their patients and different treatments they have prescribed for them. There is gall bladder-happy Kildear, Carstairs, whose patients died despite his penicillin approach,etc etc. The scene did an amazing job, in my opinion, of showing through another profession how truly absurd it is how some teachers approach their own profession. Some humorous quotes that made me both laugh and think were: "the prospect of doing pilonidal-cyst excisions brought you into medicine," "I just thought that penicillin would help the get better...each one was awful sick, Chief, and I know penicillin helps sick people get better," and "penicillin never fails to work on good patients".
ReplyDeleteEach one of us has been attracted to the teaching profession through slightly different ways, but just because you adore Shakespeare doesn't mean you need to shove the Bard down every student's throat in every type of situation. Likewise, just because one approach helps some students, doesn't mean it will help all students in all situations. Teachers need to assess each situation independently of other occurrences and know the exact circumstances rather than blindly prescribing "solutions" to every student.
The last quote I included really makes my skin crawl....that is, the assumption of "good" patients, or students. When I am a teacher I will have no good students and no bad students. I will have students that learn in one way, and students that learn another way. And a third, fourth and fifth way too. The idea that a teacher "did all they could" for a student and it still wasn't enough doesn't jive with me. I strongly believe that every student has the capacity to learn, and as a teacher it is my job to figure out how to help that child become successful. Maybe it's a different learning style or teaching method. Maybe it's helping him or her understand the directions being asked of him or her. Maybe it's giving him or her a reason to care, if they haven't had one before. But the notion of a child being a "bad" student is absurd. Maybe they need help focusing. It's my job to help them focus then. Maybe they are anxious test-takers. It's my job to help them relax and feel comforts led then. Maybe they have decided long ago that school is stupid and they will never "waste" their time cracking open a book. It's my job then to show them the merit in taking that first step, I re-kindling a desire to learn.
I believe all people are inquisitive by nature. It's why young children incessantly ask questions: why is the sky blue? How does Santa get around the world in one night? Why? Why? Why?! School and education should help them answer these questions, the ones that are important to them. Like Postman said later in the piece, "unless an inquiry is perceived as relevant by the learner, no significant learning will take place" (52). It's all about relativity, about relating with the students and making learning important to them. It's easy for a teacher to say that they taught a student, but he didn't learn the material. However, it takes a great teacher to invest the time and effort in finding what will touch a student's heart and internally motivate him or her to want to care.
*comforts led is supposed to be comfortable...whoops!
DeleteOne of, I think, the most important issues this article discusses is the fact that our nation's schools are THE institutions that prepare the next generation to become a part of the greater society. Do kids get an education elsewhere? Of course they do. From the time that they are born they are learning from their parents and the loved ones that surround them. They may also be learning valuable skills at a part time job, but, the fact remains that, "school is the one institution that is inflicted on everybody," (p. 3).
ReplyDeleteThis is one of the things that I cite the most when I get into unfortunate political conversations about taxes and where our money should go. I am constantly at a loss as to why the government has such a hard time funding the foundation of our future in our schools. If our schools aren't getting the money they need, our kids (and therefore our future) have a more difficult time getting the education that they need, and you end up churning out young adults that are ill-prepared to make important scientific breakthroughs, or develop a cure for cancer; or you get young adults that don't have the emotional capacity or well-roundedness to care for the elderly, and they may have had such a terrible time in the school system that no one wants to teach! I know, I'm definitely being overly dramatic, but the fact remains, schools are our weapon to fight for a better future and they are, therefore, our most important asset.
I think "subversiveness" comes into the picture when we realize that schools are very much a part of the politics game. The education system has always been a pawn in the political careers of our government officials, and there will always be talk about how education can be a tool to improve our status within the world's economy. Because of this, I fear that there will always be mandates coming down from people who have no idea how children learn and love to learn, telling teachers and schools what they can and can't do. Enter subversiveness. When I dreamt of being a teacher, I thought about all of the amazing ways I would get my kids to make connections. I thought about all of the cool books we would read, and all the different texts I could pull from. The reality is that teaching has become more rigid in its quest for standardization that possibly ever before. In a world that must compete with itself to be at the top of science and mathematics, schools have had to become preoccupied with meeting testing standards, often to the detriment of real, meaningful learning. So, today, being a teacher means knowing how to work around the system. It means being subversive. It means sneaking things into the curriculum that you know your kids will love, but the standard-writers will hate. It means meeting those standards (to keep your job), but twisting them around in ways that can make them applicable to the lives of teenagers.
I think teaching has become more difficult in the past decade or so, but I also think that it will be that much more rewarding.
I was amazed the issues talked about in the article were so similar to the current ones. I found a lot of similar ideas in two of the books I read last semester "The Language-Rich classroom" and "Total participation Techniques". We, as future teachers, have to make sure every single student is engaged and actively participates during the lesson. Disengaged students are usually the ones disliking school and not seeing the point of going at all, which results in dropping out. I found a lot of great ideas for total participation classroom where every student voices their opinion in a comfortable environment. Teachers have to provide ways for students to be actively,cognitively and emotionally engaged.I hope to be able to use these techniques during my internship and see if they actually work well in engaging all the students!
ReplyDelete